Demise

I’m dying.

So then, this will be my last log.

I expected the final stretch to be like crawling around on all fours, blind and deaf. Alone in a dark, abandoned warehouse. A small, wounded animal caught in a bear trap. Trembling hands sweeping through dust and debris until suddenly, in a sequence of actions innocent and indelible, I fall down a hole. That would be death and the days leading up to it.

Well, now that I'm living through it, never mind.

Instead of what I’d dreaded, it's closer to strolling through a labyrinth garden. A man with fully functioning five senses. The smell of moist dirt crawling with insects and the cold, brisk air in my lungs so dear that I forget I'm finding my way toward my own death—I may be closer to it than I’m being remiss to realize. Never mind. I am at peace. I’ve finally acquired it after all these years, so why wouldn’t I go on basking in this novel state of being burden-free?

The truth is I am neither in a decrepit, collapsing building nor a pristinely maintained garden. I am alone (that much is true) and bound to my chair. The digital text expands before me, only moments after I formulate the words in my slowing brain. Such is the high-tech dwelling I reside in.

A man becomes incalculably sentimental—and in my case, wildly imaginative as well—when his time is no longer counted up but down.

I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in an afterlife. Yet, I spend my time now mostly daydreaming about how delightfully wrong I could be, about how ignorant I might have been about heaven and our souls. And once together in nirvana again, we could laugh and laugh and laugh about it.

Darling.

I am an old, weak man.

I had been married three times. I don’t have any children. If I did, they probably wouldn’t be thinking of me.

Needless to say, I was a young man once. In those days, I was never still. My hands, never idle. My eyes, always awake. My mind, constantly occupied. I was more concerned about how far my voice carried rather than the things it carried. I jettisoned relationships that brought me discomfort because there seemed an endless supply of people—that is, until I lost someone whom I could not replace.

Darling.

Things were easy for a while. Truthfully, it was an illusion that life could be effortless, productive, and romantic, but I couldn't have possibly known it then. That there was connection between people, that one’s influence actually begat change in the world, that we were important and loved—I believed it. We all believed it.

When people started dying, no one had seen it coming. Only in the final few hours leading up to death did the skin show any symptoms of the virus. An itch. A rash. Easy enough to dismiss. Then, inflammation and the eventual swelling of the body. A frantic call to the emergency. Incoherent yelling into the phone. Sir, I need you to calm down. Those terrible, helpless minutes of watching and waiting. How could this happen? She was fine just a few hours ago! Finally, the dreaded silence. It felt as if in that brief moment, time was completely frozen for maybe, just maybe, she would open her eyes again. Darling. Nevertheless, somewhere in the room, the clock continued to tick, betraying me.

Not until those last remaining hours could we see who had contracted the virus. Not another one. People lamented. The virus spread undetected, killing nearly one-third of the unprepared global population.

Disasters, much like good fortune, do not unfold in an orderly fashion. Taking turns is something we are taught very young. Meanwhile, natural forces obey laws of their own. For a while, all I remember reading about was earthquakes, typhoons, and deadly heat waves. Food scarcity. Water scarcity. Death tolls. Mass evacuations in affected areas. Coastal cities abandoned altogether. A great exodus. A mandate to stay indoors from noon until sunset during the summer months.

What a miracle it is that I should live to tell the terrible tales, stories that leave nothing but bitterness in my mouth!

Is there such a thing as a great man? A strong man? An untouchable one? A man is but a naked man in the face of ambushing calamities. As fattened and preoccupied as we were with ourselves—our associations, our assets, our legacies—the very things we neglected grew and grew until they were powerful enough to swallow us whole.

I want to add here: one interesting effect of the said apocalypse (for a lack of a better word) was how united we were in our intrinsic fear for survival. Makes me wonder that perhaps all we needed to cleanse ourselves of divisiveness, discrimination, and unchecked feeling of superiority was perhaps a singular thing greater than us divided or combined, to conjure the most basic terror in all of us so that we feel equally meager and defeatable. Never mind in each other’s shoes, we just needed to be put in our own places.

Humor a dying man, will you?

So what happened when the world as we knew it started turning on us? It didn’t take long for us to realize that we weren’t equipped to combat the thrashing forces of nature, so we turned with our anger and confusion to adversaries we knew all too well.

Violence was fomented in the streets in the guise of coups, protests, crimes, and survival—all not without casualties. We were indeed at war, when not against each other, then against the jeers and apprehensions of our own minds. We were addicted, and to so many things at that. We craved things that made us feel good because we were so sad and things that made us feel invincible because we were broken. Then, the narrative changed, and we were taught to embrace our weaknesses and normalize our pain. After all, who among us didn’t bleed red? In those times, who among us hadn’t lost a loved one?

Darling.

We sang about our kinks, drank to our quirks, and wore our scarlet letters proudly around our necks. We went from being pariahs to oracles on platforms. Anxiety, insomnia, and depression became our personas. We were indeed at war, and when that became the status quo, we no longer had to talk about it.

The greatest distraction for man: witnessing how far one’s own voice is heard. The final dose of the greatest illusion: we were winning. We were making a difference. All the while people were dying. We were all dying. There was no solution, only a variety of misleading answers to choose from.

It truly felt like the end of times. It was during this great tribulation that I met my first wife. We fell madly in love because what else was possible? We obsessed over the impending doom and one other. I lost her to the virus.

My second wife was my partner in crime during my drug addiction. I hit rock bottom, and she joined me there. We wasted away our health and extinguished the remnants of our youth. She died from overdose, inches away from me, tangled in stained bedsheets that we never washed.

I was alone. I had absolutely nothing, and I waited to die. Word on the street was that the rich were preparing to hibernate until all the filth rotted away into the ground. I drifted in and out of sleep. I no longer slept on my bed. I could not forget the exact moment that I stopped recognizing my wife in the corpse beside me. And as soon as I lost her, I could not find her again.

Where had all my friends gone and why was I alone? Whose memories were these and where were my own?

I had been looking forward to death for a long while. Yet, it avoided me again and again because death means to be precisely on time.

My third wife was a widow. An extremely lonely woman, barely awake herself, drifting in and out of the cage in her mind. She was an unfathomably rich woman, having secured two spots for herself and her late husband for cryo-preservation. Alas, she was all alone, just like me.

How we met exactly escapes me. Some days, I think we were both sitting at a lousy bench across from one another, sweating profusely, in what used to be a park. Anyone to do that in those days would be asking for death by hyperthermia. Or perhaps, it was that she decided to take a first and last gander at the poor neighborhood before she went into hibernation and mistook me for a stray.

However we may have met, she gave her late husband’s cryo-chamber to me. My wake up call must have been set wrong because when I opened my eyes, I was alone yet again in a self-sustained, ultra high-tech bunker. This time, however, I was also trapped.

I'm still not sure how to this day, but when I awoke, I was gripping a silver heart-shaped locket. I opened it, hoping to find something where I actually found nothing instead. Now, it hangs around my neck, and I cannot recall the sentiment I must have had for it at some point prior.

I don’t know where everyone else has gone. Perhaps the world is a better place now. People are happier, healthier, and kinder to one another. Perhaps I am the last breathing human on earth, and while I entertain the thought, I find it melodramatic. Life has gone through enough, I say, and I’d like to spare it a spectacular ending.

So then, my own death must be but a passing wind in the life that is surely prospering elsewhere.

I had been journaling, as one often does in bunkers (I imagine). Some entries accurately capture my madness, and others my wisdom, but the entirety of my record is just me waiting for death to find its way into the bunker. Finally, it seems my long-awaited guest has made it.

I hope that when I do arrive at the center of the labyrinth, rather than a sinkhole waiting to swallow me into the nevermore, I would find a well-kept clearing with a tree so ancient that it is venerable and so towering that no man could see the peak of it, and I would be humbled by man’s inaccessibility. So then, I would respectfully run my fingers along the marks of its leathery, wrinkled trunk and find them indistinguishable from the marks on the skin of an old, withering man. Well, perhaps that man is me, and when we die, we become the very thing that we failed to notice that had been the only thing worth noting all along.